color me your everything
by Zayz
Summary: Nick/Jess. "You hadn't realized it before, but you have lived a life in grayscale before you met her – and now here she is, coloring in your insides with her rainbow markers, her radiant lightness, and inexplicably you know that you are never going to be the same again."


A/N: I was just in a very sappy, lyrical, metaphorical kind of mood today. I think it's all the summer heat finally getting to my head. I really have no excuse for this besides the words sounded pretty in my head. (How they sound on the page is debatable – up to you.) It's just very silly and meandering but I have this weird soft spot for it, which is why I posted it.

Second person – "you" is Nick.

Enjoy?

* * *

**color me your everything  
By: Zayz**

I am colorblind  
Coffee black and egg white  
Pull me out from inside  
I am ready

I am covered in skin  
No one gets to come in  
Pull me out from inside  
I am folded, and unfolded, and unfolding

I am colorblind  
Coffee black and egg white  
Pull me out from inside  
I am ready  
I am ready  
I am fine  
I am fine

- Counting Crows, "Colorblind"

* * *

She is sweet and tart and bright, like the ripest berries of summer. She is tye-dye and fragrant orange, heart-shaped clouds over the greenest meadow. She is a late-night snack on Christmas Eve – warm cinnamon cookies, rich hot chocolate, succulent marshmallows. She is a whirlwind of color and sound and blazing sunshine.

She dances like ribbons rippling in a breeze; she dances in circles around you while you stay stock still – lost, dazed. You try to catch her, hold her still, but she is the firefly that slips through your fingertips, always just beyond your grasp. She isn't the kind of girl to be frozen forever in a snapshot. She is so much more than a single still-frame. Some part of her is always blurred, because she's restless, endlessly entertained by life.

Cut her, and she heals three seconds later, oozing glitter and vanilla frosting.

What if we cut you?

Would you heal too? Or would you just bleed? Thin, red, metallic – mortal?

* * *

Since she moved in – clumsily, awkwardly – your roommates have followed along with her so easily, it's like they are helpless lilies swept away by the river. Living comes so naturally to them. Like flowers coming alive under an unusual stretch of sun, they blossom. She is another melody in the morning song of the kitchen; she is another load of laundry to complain about, another person with dates and plans and a job and a point of view. She fits right in, so well it's almost scary.

Slowly, she feeds you life. Trips to the beach, baking cupcakes, driving everywhere with no destination in mind. You'd forgotten how tight and stiff you've become of late, so wary after Caroline, Julia, everything that has been thrown at you. But she warms your aching joints and pours sweetness into your bones and keeps her hand steady at the small of your back, and she leads you forward, out of the rut you have made your home.

You consider resisting her incorrigible charm, hiding under your rock, keep from getting into anything emotional or messy. But she is the ocean, blue and relentless, and eventually you have no choice. Pieces of your armor chip away, and she swallows them whole. She burrows her way into your softest skin, makes you tender, makes you laugh. Makes you confess.

Yet she makes it feel like the natural way of things. She makes it feel like the world makes a strange sort of sense, when you share a picnic with her on your lunch break, away from the noise and the roommates and the expectations, and tell her everything.

You talk and talk, the story threads weaving together into a thin, shabby wool, and she just listens. And when you get tired, she takes over for you, adding her own vibrant stitches where you left off. The patterns interlace and soon enough, an earnest, slightly crooked quilt begins to form – a context, a history you have begun to make, that you can cuddle under when it gets cold and breathe together, sharing the silence.

You hadn't realized it before, but you have lived a life in grayscale before you met her – and now here she is, coloring in your insides with her rainbow markers, her radiant lightness, and inexplicably you know that you are never going to be the same again.

* * *

In the months that follow, you find yourself drawn to her – when the four of you collapse on the couch like bad soufflés to watch football, when you get in the car and two of you are always squished in the back, when she announces she's running an errand and you offer to go with her.

But, even more strangely, she is drawn to you too, almost like you're her anxious, almost-housebroken puppy and she wants to sit you on her lap and pet your head and soothe all your worries away. She fusses over you, and teases you, and ruffles your hair, but she's always near you, nearer than she is to the other guys. She likes them too, of course, but if you spin her around and let her settle into equilibrium like a compass, you both know she would land on you.

It starts friendly, but as time passes, it just doesn't feel so friendly anymore. Your hand lingers too long at her waist; her eyes linger too long at your back. She sits too close when you watch football or scramble into the car, and you let her without saying a word.

But you've never felt so alive, so full of color, until you found yourself in the spotlight of her pale eyes. Her smiley, easygoing nature relaxes you, even as it makes you cranky trying to figure her out. You don't know when or how or why it happened, but she brings out a light in you that you forgot you had. One you never really thought you did have, because you aren't traditionally sappy, or confident, or head-over-heels for anyone.

Yet you kind of like this feeling. As though you're a sunburst, a supernova, just rising to a pinnacle of brightness that could blind the entire universe.

* * *

She asks you to dance one night, when everyone else has gone to bed and you are the only two awake in the universe. You're both a bit tipsy from a pleasant evening of wine and pizza with the guys, which would probably explain why she asked and you agreed. She hums a tune, but then you go put on the CD player in the corner of the room, and something cheery and danceable starts to play, and you just grin, because everything is warm and fuzzy and perfect right now.

She falls into your arms in a sloppy ballroom-dance pose and leans her head back so you can see the pale expanse of her slender throat, the muscles straining in her neck and shoulders to hold her up when she so clearly wants to fold over into you like a paper fan. The world is so beautifully blurred around the edges, lights flickering like a lens flare across your vision; laughing, you dip her, so low her hair skims across your knee. You almost let her fall, but then you don't.

You're both drunk, but it makes the strangest sense, dancing like this, limbs tangled up in each other, breath mingling. You're both only properly yourselves when you're together, messing around like you do, living your mundane lives yet feeling magic brighten the colors, sharpen the images, add music to the silent background.

She's got construction-drill eyes, boring holes into your brown doe-like ones. It's obvious what she wants you to do. And if you were a braver man, you would sweep her up by her knees, help her shed her cheerful polka-dot dress, and kiss every inch of her porcelain skin, breathe her in and drown in all her loveliness.

But you're not a braver man, you are Nick Miller. So you hold her there in limbo, your palms sweating into the small of her back, your breath meeting in the no-man's land between you. Frozen, like a scared baby rabbit. And she just keeps staring fiercely at you, daring you to move closer.

Moments pass. You still hold her and she still stays, the tension unbearable. Disappointment creeps into her eyes, a murky film over the freshwater lakes of her irises. And you want to find some way to ask her, ask if she understands what she's already done for you, how she brought her life-giving rain to your small, desperate desert, how you're not in Kansas anymore but in some strange mystical land where nothing makes sense but there is too much beauty to tear yourself away.

You don't want to take any more from her. Act as the anchor that brings the butterfly to the ocean floor. You try to find the words to tell her this, but nothing comes.

She shakes her head at you and disentangles herself from your arms. Stumbles back to her room with her mussed hair and spinning head and unmatched expectations, her lipstick still fresh, unkissed.

* * *

She is a little bit distant after that night. Your roommates don't notice it, but you do, because you can feel the color draining out of your world again, like it was before she moved in. And after seeing the rainbows the world has to offer, you can't bear going back to the simplistic grayscale, you just can't. It's too sad, too flat, too lifeless. Now that you know better, now that you have become adjusted to sunshine and warmth and brightness, you can't go back to that. You just can't.

You have to be brave. She's waiting for you, you can feel it. Waiting for you to sort yourself out, trust this thing that has fallen into your lap and dragged you out of your dark tiny shell, and be happy.

There are reasons not to - because it may not work out, it may ruin the chemistry of the apartment, it may leave you as broken as you were when Caroline dumped you - but you can't help thinking that though you could have a million reasons not to do something, you just need a couple of good reasons to do it. And yours are that she is funny and quirky and endlessly interesting, and she makes you laugh, and she makes you happy, and you think you love her.

And maybe, just maybe, that'll be enough.

* * *

So on the next wine and pizza night, when all of you are stumbling off to bed, dead drunk, you grab her arm and put on the music again and just hold her there. She is puzzled, but you pick up her limp noodle arms and sway with her, awkward and off-beat and a little bit desperate. She narrows her eyes, confused, searching you for something. You hope you have what it is she's looking for. You bring her into you and dance faster and she asks, "What are you doing?"

"I don't know," you say. "I never have."

"What do you want to do?"

She's got that look again, that intense, blazing stare, she had that night when you chickened out. But this time you force yourself to meet her halfway. She throws her head back like she did before, her neck so pale and exposed, almost glowing in the darkness of the apartment. And this time you lean down and you kiss her throat, your face burrowing into that sweet spot between her neck and her shoulder. She tastes like vanilla and spice and something else, something that's just her own, and drives you mad with lust.

You work your way up to her jaw and then finally her lips, and when you kiss, it's like you've never kissed anyone before, no one who mattered anyway, because she is the person you were made to kiss. You kiss her and kiss her and kiss her, melt into her and fall to the couch with her, and for one wild second it's as though you've violated the laws of science and the physical world, and the boundaries of your bodies have melted away, let your souls fuse together, so together that you're almost one.

The color returns to your vision, vivid and unreal. She breaks your kiss and smiles up at you. You just stare back, breathless, still baffled at what you have just done.

She looks like she wants to say something, but then she doesn't. She just reaches up and she kisses you again and all is right with the universe.

You fall asleep like that with her, on the couch, tangled up in her. The sun rises, shining brilliantly from the window behind you, and you sleep through it with her. No sex, no hard edges, no talking. You just lie there and sleep with her in the most innocent sense of the phrase.

* * *

You only wake when Schmidt and Winston arrive in the living room, and Schmidt screams, and Winston laughs. She opens her eyes and blinks confusedly at them. You fall off the couch with astonishment and embarrassment.

Schmidt says, "Ridiculous. Ridiculous! When did this happen? _How _did this happen? Nick, did you drug her? What is going on here?!"

Winston says, "It's about time."

You say, "Shut up. I hate you both."

You pick yourself up from the floor, all pink and speechless, and she just grins.

She says, "You want breakfast?"

You say, "Okay."

And the two of you leave the loft to head to the nearest IHOP. Her hand finds yours and you squeeze tight, walk out into the technicolor.


End file.
